Ralph-Assignment-05-VisualClock

The concept behind this clock is the feeling of nostalgia and existential angst one experiences when faced with the immensity of time. My inspiration for this was the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which is written in such a way (with detailed accounts of trivial, but poetic moments) that the reader feels as if he/she has known the town and its characters for a hundred years by the end of the novel, and a great sense of loss and the fleeting nature of human life is invoked within the reader. I wanted to try to recreate this sense of awe by visually representing a clock which measures a century with fractals of clocks that represent each small moment of that century. The clock begins from my own birthday, with the circle in the middle representing one century, the circles revolving it representing one year, and so on. The clock is pretty sizable, but I would have preferred to make a much larger image, with units of time being incremented more gradually (years to decades to centuries, rather than just years to centuries) so as to evoke an immense sense of scale. However, the limits of processing power and resolution size prohibited me from this.

This piece is very slow in Javascript, so I will post a link to it rather than breaking people’s computer by embedding it here.
http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/112083